This blog was written by Christopher Martinez – the winner of the MakerSpace Mini-Grant for the month of September.
The goal of this project was to create a 3D printed music jewelry box that could play music off of a micro-SD card.
The materials required to make the box are:
- 3 AAA battery holder with switch
- Double sided copper PCB
- Wire
- 3 ohm speaker
- 3.5 mm tall tactile push buttons
- DfPlayer Mini MP3 module
The tools used were:
- Elite 3D printer
- Soldering iron and solder
- Flux pen
- Wire cutters
- Fusion 360
- EAGLE
The first step was to design the actual box. This was done using fusion 360. This is a gift for someone who loves Miyazaki movies so it is themed after Howl’s Moving Castle but you can really design your box however you’d like. The most important thing to consider is where you want to place your all of your electronics and to make sure that your sound has somewhere to come out!
Links to videos
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-XW_7-81GMyBV19-_DfHtIJBXrEANZDw
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-WeEmul8q5XRw5-Sl0LwID7HwFxX7aez
If you use the Elite 3D printer know that all of the supports need time to dissolve away so even after your part finishes printing, you will probably still need to wait a day or two until you can get your part.
Next up, I started to work with the DfPlayer Mini which is what I actually used to play the music. I wired everything up on a breadboard just to verify that I fully understood how everything worked so I could mill my own PCB. Here is a schematic on how I wired it up.
I did not end up wiring switches three or four.
If you were interested in getting more functionality out of this MP3 module you can connect it to an arduino. Instructions for this can be found here: https://www.dfrobot.com/wiki/index.php/DFPlayer_Mini_SKU:DFR0299
Next up, I designed the PCB in a program called EAGLE. I imported a DfPlayer Mini library that gave me a nice template in which to wire everything to. My wiring diagram looked like this:
After the wiring diagram was created, all of the components were places onto the board schematic. You can either manually place them or have EAGLE auto route everything for you. The autorouting lead to some issues for me so you may need to do some tweaking. This is what my board ended up looking like.
I then milled out the PCB on the Othermills that you can find in the makerspace. You will definitely need training before you are able to use them.
Once the PCB was milled, I soldered wires to all of the pads. All of the purple wires go to the buttons, the yellow and black wires are for positive and negative power, and the green and blue wires are for the speaker. The power supply was soldered to the power leads and the entire board was finished!
These parts were then just placed into the printed box and the project was finished! If you have any questions about the process, definitely feel free to reach out to me: cm4591@nyu.edu
